Sisters Dorie and Joyce Ladner were community leaders during the civil rights movement who grew up in rural Palmers Crossing, a Black community on the outskirts of Hattiesburg, where they learned to stand up for justice from their mother, Annie Ruth Perryman. As teenagers, they joined the Hattiesburg NAACP Youth Council and were mentored by Eileen Beard, Vernon Dahmer, Clyde Kennard, Dr. McLeod, and later Medgar Evers at Jackson College. After entering Jackson College in 1960 as the first in their family to attend college, they were expelled in 1961 for participating in a campus protest on behalf of the Tougaloo Nine, then enrolled at Tougaloo College and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They became Freedom Riders and worked across Mississippi in voter registration and protest campaigns: Dorie joined SNCC voter registration projects in the Delta, left Tougaloo to serve as an SNCC field secretary, directed the Natchez project for three years while facing frequent death threats, became a founding member of COFO in Clarksdale in August 1962, and was arrested three times that year, including after a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Jackson; Joyce canvassed the state organizing voter registration drives, was arrested after attempting to worship at Jackson's all-white Galloway Methodist Church, led a campaign petitioning Governor Ross Barnett to free Clyde Kennard from Parchman Penitentiary, and was denied voter registration in Hattiesburg three times because of literacy test failures. Together they took part in Hattiesburg's Freedom Day, a precursor to Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, and in major marches including the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965, and the Poor People's March in 1968. Dorie was also a plaintiff in the lawsuit that overturned inequitable voting requirements. They lived to see results of their work, including passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, and their efforts also helped ignite the late 1960s women's movement and support legislation banning gender discrimination added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dorie later graduated from Tougaloo College, earned a master's in social work from Howard University in 1976, and worked at the District of Columbia General Hospital for thirty years, while Joyce earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Washington University, St. Louis, in 1968 and became a professor, author, vice president of Howard University from 1990 to 1994, and interim president from 1994 to 1995.